A dream or a bird?: the red meat guys and the Christmas poem

By Riaan de Villiers

As part of a lovely piece about windmills, water, and the general interconnectedness of things in the Nuwe Hantam (From windmills to turbines), my friend and Toverview editor-in-chief Maeder Osler sent me the following Christmas greeting distributed by the Red Meat Producers Organisation of the Northern Cape (RPO):

 

This somehow didn’t ring true. The start — up to the end of the third verse — was really nice, but this did not seem to chime with verses four and five. Added to this, no author was cited. So I did some googling. Lo and behold, I found that the first part is a poem by one Alet van Zyl, and the second part has simply been added on, with no indication of provenance.

Geez, red meat guys – this isn’t great. I do accept that you didn’t mean anything by it, as the saying goes, but haven’t you heard of copyright, or at least the obligation to credit authors?

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Interestingly, my googling showed, Alet’s poem — with its fine and evocative first stanza in particular — has become quite popular, and has bounced around social media in various ways. One Facebook rendition (on a page titled Christus Volgelinge) is reproduced below:

 

Not a great design, but at least Alet’s name got squeezed in.

Then, the poem also came up in the context of a 2017 episode of the cheesy television program ‘Boer Soek ‘n Vrou’ – said to be: ‘… die boodskap op ’n kussing wat Jacques vir Melandri as geskenk gegee het’.

Yikes. I regret to say that I could not muster the energy to ascertain why Jacques gave Melandri a gift on a pillow, who they are or were in any case, and what happened to them afterwards.

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But there’s another, deeper, layer to this story. One of the reasons why I don’t write for sites like LitNet is because I can’t remember the difference between themes, memes and tropes. And if you’re not on top of this sort of thing, you’re toast – those guys with the little round specs will give you a big red fail, right at the start.

So I don’t know whether this idea or theme of sending people stuff is a meme or a trope. Or neither. At any rate, I then found this poem by Breyten Breytenbach, where all of this might have started:

Allerliefste, ek stuur vir jou ‘n rooiborsduif

Want niemand sal’n boodskap wat rooi is, skiet nie.

Ek gooi my rooiborsduif hoof in die lug en ek

Weet al die jagters sal dink dis die son.

Kyk, my duif kom op en my duif gaan onder

En waar hy vlieg daar skitter oseane

En bome word groen

En hy kleur my boodskap so bruin oor jou vel

Want my liefde reis met jou mee,

my liefde moet soos ‘n engel by jou bly,

Soos vlerke, wit soos ‘n engel.

Jy moet van my liefde bly weet

Soos van vlerke waarmee jy nie kan vlieg nie.

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Apparently, despite Breyten then still largely being persona non grata in the Afrikaner establishment, it was a prescribed poem in Standard 9 or matric in the Free State in 1987 or 1988. I learnt this from an excellent essay by Johann Rossouw on the very same Litnet, titled Die Johann Rossouw-gespreksreeks: Oor Breyten; vir Breyten, and who was at school in the Free State at that time.

He goes on to write that, when he asked his teacher about Breyten, she replied caustically that  the latter was  ‘ … nóg een van daardie Afrikaanse skrywers was wat gedink het jy moet na Parys toe gaan om te kan skryf”; subteks: “Hy het gedink hy is beter as ons.” Yes well no fine.

Rossouw – an author, public intellecual, and lecturer in philosophy at the University of the Free State – writes compellingly about his interaction with Breyten … ‘die onopsluitbare digter wat die eerste was wat mý tronk oopgesluit het deur met sy voorbeeld my bewus te maak van die wêreld – nee, van wêrelde – buite die tronk waarin ek soos een van die gevangenes in Plato se grot grootgeword het.’

He also writes as follows about receiving news of Breyten’s death in Paris earlier this year:

‘ … En toe, verlede Sondagmiddag kort ná drie, op ’n stralende Vrystaatse dag op ons stoep met ons braaivleisvuur byna gereed, land die boodskap op my selfoon, die boodskap wat ek nooit wou ontvang nie, die boodskap wat dit onmoontlik gemaak het om langer te glo dat Breyten nie onsterflik is nie. En ek het langs die vuur geween.’

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FEATURED IMAGE: Statue by Nanette Ranger in die garden at the Breytenbach Centre in Wellington, March 2023. (Riaan de Villiers)